Pastiche

In GAD We Trust – Episode 23: What’s in a Watson? [w’ Caroline Crampton]

/ JJ / 11 Comments

The companion of the fictional detective — the “stupid friend” as Ronald Knox styled them — is something I have spent far too long thinking about, mainly because the protoype is always taken to be Sherlock Holmes’ chronicler Dr. John H. Watson. Joining me this week to discuss why that might not always be a good comparison to draw is Caroline Crampton of the superb Shedunnit podcast.

Continue reading →

#635: A Taste for Honey (1941) by H.F. Heard

/ JJ / 10 Comments

Taste for Honey, Astar filledstar filledstarsstarsstars
It’s difficult to know where to begin with A Taste for Honey (1941), the first of three ‘Mr. Mycroft’ novels by H.F. Heard.  The core conceit is delightfully barmy — I shall avoid naming it in this review to preserve it for the curious — and played with an impressively straight face, but beyond that there’s really only a short story’s worth of content here, spread thinly over 189 generously-margined pages.  With only one plot-line, only really three characters, and nothing to widen the universe or engage the mind in any meaningful way past the halfway point (when the ending will already be painfully obvious to anyone), this really is just a latter-day Holmes pastiche with verbal diarrhoea.

Continue reading →

#458: The Sleek Interpreters – Bringing the Young Holmes Brothers to Life in Mycroft and Sherlock (2018) by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse

/ JJ / 10 Comments

Mycroft and Sherlock
Three years ago, when The Invisible Event was but a callow youth, I happened upon a Sherlock Holmes-universe novel co-written by someone who shared their name with NBA Hall-of-Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  “Wow,” I thought, “that guy must hear the same thing all the time…” — and then it turned out that it actually was NBA Hall-of-Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and, well, I became even more interested.

Continue reading →

#440: The Hollow Case of the Distressed Lady in A Different Kind of Evil (2018) by Andrew Wilson

/ JJ / 14 Comments

Different Kind of Evil UK

Andrew Wilson’s first novel featuring Agatha Christie, A Talent for Murder (2017), met with positive reviews but seemed rather more Highsmithian than detection in concept (perhaps unsurprising, as Wilson has written a biography of Patricia Highsmith) and so I passed it over.  And then John Norris — patron saint of the obscure, the forgotten, and the damned-near impossible-to-find — posted this rave review of the follow-up, A Different Kind of Evil (2018), and definitely caught my interest.

Continue reading →

#438: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #8: The Magic Bullet (2011) by Larry Millett

/ JJ / 24 Comments

Magic Bullet

I shall eventually abandon any pretence that my occasional forays into post-1990 impossible crime novels are purely for the benefit of my fellow impossible crime enthusiast TomCat, but not just yet.  So let’s all take a moment to bask in how selfless I am, reading books I have no interest in myself purely so that TC can find something more modern to satisfy the cravings of the Impossible Murder Phanatic (or ‘Imp’, as those people have definitely been calling themselves for years now).

Continue reading →